


Measurably Away

by Neelh



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Autistic Pines Family, Communication Failure, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse, Poor Life Choices, Stangst, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-08
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-08-20 07:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8241328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neelh/pseuds/Neelh
Summary: Ford leaves Gravity Falls on the tenth of July.





	1. say something, anything

Ford leaves Gravity Falls on the tenth of July.

You know this because you’re there, you’ve only got a couple of months until you turn fifteen, and you’ve been helping him pack his bags for a week. He had asked you to help, and that’s the only reason that you know that he’s leaving. He asks you instead of Stanley or Mabel, and he says it’s because he doesn’t want to hurt them, but Mabel has a way with words that would convince him to stay, and Stanley is about half of Ford’s reasons for living. If he had asked one of them for help, he wouldn’t have put the first handmade turtleneck in the suitcase.

You’re not as good with words. You can feel all those mixed emotions of seeing your great-uncle’s things being packed into boxes; some pushed against the wall and some in Ford’s car. It’s old, the blue paint is chipped, and he got it for cheap, but it’ll do the job of getting him away from this dumb town.

When you asked him where he was going, Ford had deflected. “Should this go in the suitcase or should I keep it on me?” he had asked, holding up his gun holster. It was made of canvas and leather, worn down over the years into a fragile softness, and to be honest you don’t care either way. When you shrug, Ford places it over his shoulder like a sash and places one of his favourite plasma guns in the holster.

He’d stopped wearing his trenchcoat as often. He looks kind of strange without it. More vulnerable, perhaps. You’re not really sure. You’ve never been good at reading the subtleties in facial expressions and the curls of fingers and hunched shoulders. Mabel had learnt that language when you were both young, and Grunkle Stan made a living off of knowing what a person was thinking with barely a hint. Maybe that’s why Ford asked for your help. Maybe he knew that you wouldn’t ask questions, that you wouldn’t pry, not out of a lack of curiosity but an incapability of words, of a way to break his defences.

Stan and Mabel don’t suspect anything. They think that’s you’re doing “weird nerd stuff” and that when the week’s out, you’ll have a great new invention to show them.

But at the end of those seven days, you stand on the porch as Grunkle Ford closes the back of the car. Mabel’s at a sleepover with the girls and Grunkle Stan takes his hearing aid out at night, so there’s not a huge chance of being caught. Ford had figured that out during June.

“Stay safe, Dipper,” he says, placing a hand on your shoulder. You’re almost as tall as him now. It’s been four years and you’re almost as tall as him and he’s leaving. He never said for how long. You think of asking him that, but you don’t. You think about saying a lot of things.

“ _You’ll break them_ ,” you don’t say, referring to Stan and Mabel, and you’re not sure whether or not it would be a lie, because those two are the strongest people you know.

“ _They’ll never forgive you_ ,” you don’t say, because those two are the most forgiving people you know. Ford could have killed the entire town and his brother and grandniece would have forgiven him as soon as he confessed. They never had your ruthless streak.

“ _You’re a coward_ ,” you don’t say, because no matter how much you want it to be, it wouldn’t be a lie. It would just be hurtful, and Ford would look at you as though you just stabbed him, and then turn away with a look like a kicked puppy. It wouldn’t do anything but drive a rift between the two of you.

So instead you just nod, and he pulls you into a hug, and you cling to the trenchcoat that he finally put back on, trying to commit this feeling in your memory because you might never get the opportunity again. Your face is pressed against a strong shoulder, and when you breathe in through your nose you can identify coffee and nicotine and bourbon and Mabel’s flowery shower gel. He said that he’d quit using the latter three last year after a really big argument with the entire family a few months ago, and for a moment your blood runs cold, but then Ford breaks away and sits on the porch, patting the space next to him and looking up at you. You sit, lowering yourself slowly and curling up into a ball.

“It’s nearly two,” you say, and Ford shrugs.

“Stanley doesn’t wake up until half past seven, and Mabel will be back at around ten,” he replies. “I… I think we’ve got time.”

You take off your pine tree cap and run a hand through your hair. It sticks to your fingers and you wriggle out the knots as Ford chuckles quietly.

“Are you going to do something bad?” you ask, and Ford stops laughing.

He stares at his feet for a moment, wringing his six-fingered hands together. He looks up, he looks you in the eyes, and he says, “No. I… I’m going to leave all of that behind.”

“How?” you hiss, trying to explain some wave of anger that’s flooding through your body. You clench your fists. “How is leaving here going to help?”

“I don’t know!” Ford replies, his voice sounding like he’s being choked. “But every day I’m in this house, in this town, I feel like I’m slowly dying.”

He opens his mouth again, taking a breath as if he wants to continue, but he just breathes out shakily through his nose. The two of you sit for a while as the wind rustles through the trees. Distantly, you notice the distinctive sounds of a fight between Mothman and an owl. Every time Ford breathes or shuffles where he is sitting, you can feel him and hear him and this could be the last time you ever see him again.

“Dipper,” you hear his voice say.

You glance at Grunkle Ford, but he seems to just be staring at the waxing moon on the horizon and you almost think that you were hearing things until he continues.

“I know I haven’t been the best great-uncle. That… That was always Stanley,” he chuckles, before his eyebrows furrow and his mouth slips into a frown. “But please, never think that I d… That I don’t love the three of you. You’re all so…” He gestures outwards with his hands. “I’m sorry that I’m leaving, but I have to.”

“I know, Grunkle Ford,” you say, even though you don’t know, and you don’t understand. But this is Ford’s choice, and you hope it’s the best one that he could make.

He hugs you again, and he doesn’t mention that you’re crying into his turtleneck, handmade by Mabel. What’s she going to say?

As Grunkle Ford pulls away from you, you decide that it’s a question for tomorrow, and not today as your great-uncle stands up and walks to his car. You follow numbly, leaving your hat on the porch where the two of you were sitting.

You think that he’s ignoring you as he unlocks the car and opens the door, but at the last moment, he turns around and ruffles your hair with the same smile you remember from when you were twelve and only just beginning to befriend the man in the basement.

“Stay weird, my boy,” he says. His face falters for a moment, as if he regrets those words, but then he smiles and gets in the car. As the motor starts up, you turn away and begin to walk back to the house. Your head feels kind of wrong without a hat, so you put your cap back on and adjust it so that it sits right.

When you turn around again, you see the back of the car for a second before it is swallowed up by the forest path.

 

-

 

“Kid? Kid, wake up! Ford’s gone missing!”

You open a bleary eye to see Grunkle Stan’s face inches away from your own. If you were more aware, you probably could have guessed that from the warm and incredibly horrific stench of morning breath wafting onto your face.

“He’s not here, and he hasn’t left a note saying where he is! He _always_ leaves a note.”

“Heyeh?” you groan. You were having an incredibly pleasant dream about creating your own television show about werewolves, and you’re not really sure what’s going on, to be frank.

Grunkle Stan lets out some kind of cross between a yell and a groan, translating your noise into words. “He didn’t _forget_! He always leaves a note. He doesn’t forget to, ever, not after that time with the vampire!”

You rub your eyes and sit up. “He left,” you say quietly.

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” Grunkle Stan begins to pace away from you, and you swing your legs out of bed.

“No, you don’t understand,” you say. “He _left_. He didn’t want to tell you and Mabel.”

“Who did the what now?”

And no, Mabel wasn’t supposed to come in at this time. She was supposed to be here later, and you could break the news gently and separately so that you wouldn’t have to explain how little you understand Grunkle Ford to two emotional Pineses.

“Did Grunkle Ford go out to get us a puppy? Is the puppy gonna have six little toe beans? Waddles wants a new friend!” she beams, completely oblivious because she’s probably slept less than you have and how are you supposed to tell her?

“Where is he?” Grunkle Stan asks, and you can answer that question. It’s not overly complex. Or maybe it is, but you just can’t see it.

“I don’t know,” you say.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

And maybe you missed some subtlety in the question, so you try to explain more, but apparently, “He left the town because he doesn’t like it here,” doesn’t really cut it.

The mattress and bedframe screech and groan loudly as Grunkle Stan sits down on the edge of your bed. “I don’t understand,” he mumbles. Then he looks up at you, and the cloudy sunrise reflects red in his glasses. “I don’t _understand_!” he shouts, and the noise is too much and you flinch away.

“What’s happening?” asks Mabel, her voice quivering. Your stomach gurgles, empty and nauseous.

“The jerk _left_ ,” Stanley growls. “He didn’t even tell us.”

“He told me,” you murmur. “He asked me to help pack, because you two would make him stay.”

Grunkle Stan balls his fists in your bedsheets. “Yes, because he _lives_ here. Because this is his _home_ , this is where his _family_ is!”

Mabel still stands in the middle of the room, her eyes wide, and you wish that you didn’t know her well enough to tell how distraught she is. “Where is Grunkle Ford?”

“He’s gone and abandoned me again.”

Stanley’s voice is quiet, with a low note of danger that makes you want to run away. Your sister edges closer to you, not taking her eyes off of Grunkle Stan, whose knuckles have gone white. You remain like that with the two of them, frozen like a deer hidden in the grass, until Stanley rises to his feet and storms away with enough force to leave a slight breeze that smells like leftovers and old cologne.

Mabel flops onto her bed, still unmade from yesterday morning. It feels like years ago, and you almost expect a cloud of dust to billow out around her, making you both cough.

But it’s only been a day. Less than a day, even. Less than a day since you were keeping your great-uncle’s departure a secret, when you still thought of it in abstractions even as you finished packing shampoo and spare change with him.

And now you’re sitting on your bed, your cold feet bare and hanging off the side, staring at Mabel’s posters and photographs on the wall. She’s lying on her back, looking blankly at the ceiling, without Waddles to comfort her.

You can do that, you decide. You can find Waddles and bring him to Mabel because cuddling Waddles helps Mabel feel better. You wish that your problems could be solved like that, even though you know that Mabel is a lot more complex than you’re telling yourself she is. She’s going to be sad about this for a long time, but Waddles offers her a distraction and a way of working through those negative thoughts.

You don’t have a Waddles. You have mysteries and your family and that’s about it. But your family feels wrong now, and you don’t think it’s going to go away. Not like Grunkle Ford did. Here, then gone. Grunkle Stan shuffles around downstairs loudly, but sometimes his feet fall in a pattern that makes you think that it’s Ford, but only for a moment. The illusion breaks easily.

You stand up and leave the room.

The stairs still creak and groan under your feet, like complaining children during the funeral of a relative that they only met a few times. You twitch at their sound and begin to search for Waddles.

He’s not in the kitchen or the living room, which were the two most likely places, so instead you try to listen for the sound of snuffles and oinking. It’s kind of difficult to focus though, because you can hear everything from your own heartbeat to the grumbling heating system to the creaking that never stops in the Shack, as though the house itself is breathing.

You begin to wander, because that’s as safe a bet as any for finding Waddles, and upon entering the gift shop you see the grown pig, now about four feet long, sitting at the vending machine.

“C’mon,” you say, and Waddles looks up before snorting quietly. “Come on, Mabel needs you.”

He squeals a little and follows you as you climb the stairs; his trotters clopping on the wood. When you open the door and Waddles scampers into your shared attic bedroom as well as a two-hundred-pound pig can, her face brightens up and she lifts him onto the bed.

She looks like she wants to talk to you, and you fight to force yourself to turn around and walk out of the door. You don’t know if you can talk about it right now. You don’t think that you can do anything right now.

So you go back to the kitchen and you pour yourself a bowl of off-brand cereal and check to see if the milk’s expired, exactly the same as every other morning. When you look at the clock it’s the same time that Ford would come down for his first cup of coffee, and you’d offer to pour him some cereal but he rarely took you up on that offer. And even with the sight of Ford’s car disappearing down the forest path emblazoned behind your eyelid, and even with the memories of your last conversation before Ford left already growing fuzzy, you still expect him to come in and whack the coffee machine until it starts working.

He doesn’t, though. Which is rather obvious. But something in your mind stops you from putting the milk back in the fridge and the cereal back in the cupboard, even as you wash up the bowl and drink a glass of orange juice.

Then you stand up and put the milk back in the fridge and the cereal in the cupboards and slam the doors a bit too hard. You make coffee next, and start to drink it as soon as it’s dribbled out of the machine in splattering splurts into your Ghost Harassers mug. Well, the printed logo has faded in places, so now it instead proclaims _Gho t ra sers_.

The coffee burns your tongue and the back of your throat, leaving your tastebuds useless and sore after one sip. You still drink it though, mindlessly, and trying to ignore the wordless thoughts bouncing around your brain and hitting the inside of your metaphorical skull. Thoughts that feel like _you’re a coward_ and _he always leaves a note_ and _the jerk left me again_ and your sister staring at the ceiling as quiet and unmoving as the dead and a hug that felt like a very long millisecond in your memory. It feels like your skull is going to split open like that lumberjack ghost’s was when you were twelve, and Ford was the axe and your head is going to ooze blood and brain and maybe it will hurt less, like how ancient Neolithic people trephined holes in each other’s heads to release bad spirits or something. It would make sense, you guess, but you can’t explain why. That’s why it’s a guess, you guess.

“Bro? Bro-bro? Brosephino the Broton?”

You hum, looking up from your empty coffee mug. Mabel is at the other side of the table, staring at you with an eyebrow raised and a vaguely amused half-smile on her lips. Waddles sits at her feet quietly.

“Great!” she says when you look at her. “You want a refill?”

“Um, yeah,” you say, and she takes your mug from out of your hands and places it under the coffee machine. As the machine whirs to life again under Mabel’s careful patting and gentle words, you continue to stare at her.

“D-“

“How long were you standing there for?” you ask at the same time that she turns to you, your mug in her hand. She jolts a little, but still places the mug down in front of you without spilling any of it. You immediately take a sip, not even feeling the heat anymore.

“Slow down, Dipple Ripple,” she says, gently pulling your hands to place your drink back on the table. “And I don’t know how long I was there for; you just looked like you need comforting. So I, uh, kept saying your name until you noticed me? I lost count after the third _Dippinator_.”

You stare at her, feeling your mouth draw into a straight line. “ _I_ look like I need comforting?”

It’s a question, but you don’t ask it like a question. More like as a dull statement of face.

Mabel returns your expression, but looking more confused than, well, expressionless. “Yes?”

Technically, her reply isn’t a question, but the lilt to her voice as she speaks makes it sound like one, so you say, “No. No I don’t. You, however, _do_.”

She laughs immediately, bold and brash and making Waddles screech with surprise. “Me? Need comforting? Ha! No! No way! No-nee no-nee pepperoni!”

You sip your coffee as Mabel stands in front of you. The drink is now at a temperature where it won’t burn you as you drink it. You suddenly want it a lot less, but continue sipping.

There is a long moment of silence.

“I need comforting, don’t I?” asks Mabel.

“Yes,” you reply, finishing your coffee, standing up, and placing your mug in the sink. “Yes you do. Do you want to watch The Cranky Girl Who Did Chores In Spirit Town?”

Mabel nods, a grin spreading across her face. “Let me get the snacks.”

 

-

 

Ford calls you for the first time on the eighteenth of October, and you almost don’t pick up the phone.

You’ve been getting a lot of cold calls recently, mostly robots wanting to sell you insurance, and the number that comes up is unknown. But you look around your room, devoid of anyone but yourself and a Neil Degrasse Tyson poster, and you decide that frankly, anything would be better than this bored silence.

You’re expecting a clear-voiced recording to start asking you rhetorical questions about your non-existent pension fund, but instead as you press your phone to your ear, a half-familiar voice crackles through.

“Hello?”

You almost hang up, because you are not up for talking to a possible actual person. You were prepared for a robot, not this! But instead, your foolish reflexes that were drilled into you by the groups that your parents forced you and Mabel to attend when you were diagnosed as autistic kicked in instead.

“Hello?” you ask the mysterious person’s voice.

“Dipper!” the voice says, and your brain clicks back to Dungeons Dungeons And More Dungeons and memory guns and aged books being passed between an enthusiastic, if unconventional and dysfunctional, family.

“Grunkle Ford?” you ask, unable to stop yourself from copying his excited tone.

“Yes, it’s me!” he replies. “I know I said that I wouldn’t call, and I don’t really want you telling anyone that I did call, but I’ve got something to tell you!”

The sounds of movement blast down the phone like Mabel’s very loud fart noises that she makes sometimes to make you jump or laugh. You jump this time.

“Sorry, my boy, one of those incredibly loud motorcycles just went past,” he said. “But anyway, I… Ah, I got a job.”

“Really?” you ask, and you hope it sounds more like you’re excited and happy for him instead of sarcastic, because you really are happy for him! So you tell him that, and he chuckles warmly.

“Would you believe that some bars still employ pianists? I thought they would have all switched over to Theremins by now!” Ford laughs, and you don’t have the heart to tell him that almost nobody plays the Theremin.

There’s a pause where you hear nothing but Grunkle Ford’s quiet breaths and, more distantly, traffic beeping and humming as cars stop and start. For a second, you think that he’s forgotten you, before he speaks again.

“My sixth finger came in useful for once,” he murmurs, and you hear every uncomfortable click of his teeth or the tiny noise that happens as his lips touch and part as he makes precise, soft words. “You know, I was originally going to have it removed? But the doctor said that it would probably leave me with less dexterity. I wouldn’t be able to write anymore.” He laughs quietly, a huff of breath that you imagine clouds around his stubbly cheek like faint smoke. “Not like I do much of that anymore.”

“Um, what have you been doing?” you ask, because you can’t really think of a better opening for that question. You’ve been thinking about that often, but probably not as much as Grunkle Stan, who calls sometimes and listens to Mabel and doesn’t say much himself except for the odd laugh and avoiding any questions regarding his own wellbeing.

It seems to be yet another trait that he and his brother share, because Ford says, “Oh, this and that. Nothing much.”

To be frank, you would have been less concerned if he’d told you he was sleeping in an alleyway next to a dead pigeon. Okay, that’s not true because you’d be a lot more concerned, but at least you’d have a reason for the weird anxious feeling in your stomach.

“Anyway, uh, how are…” Ford pauses. “How are the others?”

You kind of mumble, because you’re not sure how to explain the situation other than as “Okay.”

How are you supposed to explain Grunkle Stan’s radio silence and the fact that he usually only calls every other week instead of every other day? How do you explain Soos texting you, confused and stressed because his kind-of dad won’t talk to him? How do you explain walking into Mabel’s room and seeing her laptop open with websites about various mental illnesses and science museums and a notebook with vague theories on where her other Grunkle could be and how to help the remaining one?

“Where are you?” you say instead of giving any of your vague answers that won’t make it past the half-formed state in your brain.

There’s an even longer silence, and for a moment you have to check to see if Ford’s hung up, but he hasn’t and he breathes out slowly and says, “I’d rather you didn’t know that, Dipper.”

“Mabel’s trying to find you,” you blurt out, and then you want to say more, but you don’t, and why _don’t_ you? Why don’t you just _talk_ to him?

“She won’t find me,” he says. “I’m not living under my own name anymore, I gave it back to Stanley, and that’s okay. I’m fine with it. I don’t need anyone to find me; I just need to keep going the way I am and it’ll work out. I’ll be fine, Dipper, and your family should be fine too.”

“They’re your family too, Grunkle Ford!” you shout, and then you clap a hand over your mouth. Mabel’s in the room across the hallway, but if you’re lucky she will have been listening to music and won’t have noticed because she’s too busy reading the same websites on science museums and mental illnesses.

Ford goes silent again for a very long time, and when you take the phone away from your ear, you see that he has hung up. You fling your phone across the room, but it makes a pathetic little arch before skidding on the carpet and bumping to a halt against your bookcase.

 

-

 

Life goes on for you, somehow, and then you’ve asked your parents if you can spend Hanukkah with Grunkle Stan this year, and Mabel drops a few hints that _maybe_ he’s got bad brain things like Aunt Claire did and they agree surprisingly quickly. So your bags are packed, Soos is alerted, and you and Mabel have left your parents’ presents around the house like a scavenger hunt, and now you’re on the bus and your leg won’t stop jiggling and you don’t stop chewing the silicone pendant that Mabel got you last year. It’s shaped a bit like a Klein bottle and it’s usually kind of funny to imagine putting an actual entire Klein bottle in your mouth usually but now all you can think of is how weird the Shack was in August; like it was full and empty at the same time. It’s going to be the same for these two weeks, you just know it.

Mabel has reindeer antlers, despite the fact that you’re both raised Jewish, because she _will_ celebrate every holiday that she can with all of the friends that she has, and Soos is kind of Catholic in the way that he won’t disappoint Abuelita by not going to church. She keeps on squealing about how Shabbat coincides with Christmas Eve so Christmas won’t happen during Hanukkah.

When you finally get off the bus, Grunkle Stan is there to greet you and Mabel, wearing one of the V-neck sweaters that Mabel made for him last year over a blue striped shirt. You suppose that Ford is probably wearing one of his Mabel Hanukkah Turtlenecks, if he remembers the date. He usually forgot it, and Stan only started to celebrate it as an excuse to give Soos and the kids more presents than usual. They were usually little cheap things, but sometimes he would have splurged and Soos would get an Adolescent Radioactive Samurai Tortoises boxset and Mabel would get some ridiculously expensive yarn and Dipper would get the deluxe version of The Bad First Impressions’s new album.

But this year, you have to remind him to read the blessings when you light the menorah because he’s the only one who can actually read Hebrew and Ford always used to read it, so after Stan has done everything that he needs to he goes to his bedroom instead of playing Dreidel with you and Mabel.

Five days after you and Mabel arrived, you can’t sleep, so you guess that the best thing that you can do is go downstairs and get a snack or something. Mabel said something about Mom saying something about carbohydrates helping you to sleep, so you’re on your way to the kitchen to get a loaf of bread when you hear it.

A clatter echoes distantly, and you glance around to find the culprit.

It’s nobody in the hallway, so you tick off the most likely places that a noise like that could originate from.

The gift shop’s the most likely place; robbers tend to not know that Stan doesn’t keep his money in such an easy-to-reach area. You walk there to find nobody, but another shuffling noise keeps you in that room.

Could he really have gone back there?

You type in the key and the vending machine swings open silently. Your eyes widen slightly, realising that you had expected it to creak in some way from disuse. Still, it ran as smooth as clockwork. Well, well-kept clockwork. That simile always seemed pretty dumb, to be honest.

You leave the vending machine door open when you walk down the stairs and into the elevator. If Mabel wakes up and can’t find you, she’ll probably end up panicking, but only after checking the entire house for you. Leaving the vending machine open is basically putting up a huge sign telling everyone that you’re in there.

There are three floors in the basement, but the likelihood of someone being in one of them is far greater than the chances of that someone being in one of the other two. The other two rooms are pretty much empty, you think. At least, you haven’t been down there in ages and the last time you did, Ford was dismantling everything and moving all of his machinery into boxes. That leaves the room that once held the portal. There’s still a load of scrap metal in there, and that would explain the clatter.

When the elevator door opens and you make your way through the control room, you see that you were right. Grunkle Stan drags a piece of scrap metal from the portal across the floor, grunting as he does so. He’s still in his suit, for some reason.

“Grunkle Stan, what are you doing?” you call, because there’s not much else you can do.

He looks up at you, his eyes widening as his face falls. “Are you real?”

“Um, yes?” you reply. Hopefully you are. You’re not really up for existentialism right now. That’s more of Soos’s and Mabel’s thing, surprisingly.

“No, you’re not,” says Grunkle Stan. “If you are, that means I got him back. It means I got him back and then he left again and it was _my fault_.”

“I’m real,” you say, “and it happened. But it wasn’t your fault. C’mon, Grunkle Stan, sit down in the other room. That stuff’s probably really heavy.”

You have no idea what you’re doing as you guide him over to the chair in the control room. Stan is, well, you know that he’s never really done all that well in the mental health department, because that’s the Pines family’s worst-kept secret, and Mabel had said that he seemed sadder than usual, and Soos had agreed but in more words and with more mildly gross anecdotes. What are you supposed to do? Mabel’s better at this, but she’s sleeping, and you’re here so you’ve got to talk him out of this weird brain problem. You don’t know if it’s PTSD or a hallucination or a delusion or what but it’s kind of scary.

“Grunkle Stan, it’s Hanukkah, and Grunkle Ford isn’t here because he left to go on a trip,” you say in as calm a voice as you can manage.

“No,” mutters Stan, looking away and through the window to the portal room. “He left because of me.”

“Grunkle Ford left for his own reasons,” you continue softly. “It had nothing to do with-“

“Bullshit,” Stan growls. “He left because he’s fucked up in the head and I didn’t take care of him and now he’s off doing fuck knows what. He could be _dead_! And none of us would know because he won’t even fucking call.”

You shouldn’t say it. You shouldn’t tell him. Ford had said when he first asked you to help him leave that he wanted a clean break from this family, from this world. He said that he wanted to disappear from this place.

“He called me,” you say.

Stan stares at you, and if you didn’t know any better you’d think that he has laser vision or something because you can feel your face burn and you look away.

“ _What did you say_?” he hisses.

Well. You’re fucked whatever you say. It might as well be the truth, you guess. “He called me. A couple of months back. He told me that he got a job. He told me not to tell you or anyone else.”

For a second, Stan’s fists clench and his shoulders tense. He’s going to stand up and shout at you and hit you, but then he just. He kind of deflates, like a punctured bouncy castle. He slumps back in his chair and you perch on the desk next to him.

“I thought, maybe one day, he’d talk to me,” murmurs Grunkle Stan. “I thought that he’d call and he’d say that he wants to come home and he’d come back and we could go back to normal. He’s… He’s not, though, isn’t he?”

You don’t know what Stan wants you to say. His tone is so flat, but he worked for thirty years out of faint, blind hope, and you’re not sure what taking away that hope would do to him. You’re not even sure if you’re supposed to say something, because he looks like he is about to start a monologue, like _whether ‘tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune_.

“I don’t know,” you eventually say, because you don’t, and you might as well tell the truth. “I don’t think so.”

 

-

 

It isn’t until late spring that you hear from Ford again. You’re in the toilet at school taking a leak after a panic attack when your phone rings, and you quickly finish doing your business to pick up the call as quickly as possible.

“Hello?” you say, washing your hands and holding your phone in the crook of your shoulder like Mom does sometimes.

“Dipper,” Ford’s voice says, and you’d forgotten what he sounded like. Then again, his speech is also slightly slurred, so maybe that’s why you don’t recognise him. At least you had put him in your contacts with an old picture of him holding Mabel as they both pulled silly faces.

“Yeah?” you ask, drying your hands on the knees of your jeans and shifting to hold your phone in your hand.

“I need you to look something up for me,” he says. “You don’t have to, though.”

“It’s okay, I’ve got a free period,” you reply. Eh. You’re acing algebra, and Ms. Jake likes you enough to let you off. You can skip a class to go to the library.

“C-Good.” You can hear the faint, sleepy smile in Ford’s voice as you power walk out of the bathroom and towards the mercifully nearby library. “Can you look up the interaction between… With… Damn it, where did I put that?” After a few seconds, Ford says, “Codeine, clonidine, and, uh, fluvoxamine.”

You bound up the stairs, thankful that nobody seems to be around, and swing through the library doors quietly before finding a computer and logging on. Grunkle Ford rambles about a bird outside of his window and swears a lot as you find a website that checks the interactions of different drugs.

“Grunkle Ford, what was it again?” you ask.

“Another fucking magpie!” he shouts, and you wince as the librarian glares at you.

“No, before that, the list,” you say, your hands hovering over the keyboard. “There was codeine, but what else?”

Ford’s voice wavers. “Clonidine and… Clonidine and fluvoxamine.”

You enter those into the website, and then ask, “What else have you had today?”

There’s a sound like interference in the phone’s signal, but it’s probably just Grunkle Ford humming as he thinks again. “Um, just coffee, I think. I, I’m getting better, Dipper. I’m just kind of…” He groans.

“You can do it,” you smile, before reading the symptoms. “Okay, apparently you should be feeling dizzy, and nauseous, and anxious? And agitated and restless but tired and stuff?”

“So this isn’t a normal level of those things?” he asks.

You say “Nope,” and continue scrutinising the website. “You should probably go and see a doctor.”

“I will,” Ford replies, his voice soft and pliant. For a moment, your blood runs cold, then he says, “Goodbye, Dipper, stay safe,” which is frankly kind of hypocritical, and he hangs up.

You put your phone back in your pocket, log out of the computer, and walk to the section of the library with the non-fiction books. You pick up one at random, which turns out to be a paperback about Shakespeare’s life, and you begin to mindlessly read for the next fifty minutes until the bell rings and you go for lunch.

 

-

 

Mabel has had to start shrinking Waddles down in order to take him to Gravity Falls, which isn’t surprising. He _is_ kind of huge, and also apparently some kind of rare British breed? You didn’t even bat a metaphorical eyelid, because he came from Gravity Falls, and it would have been just as likely for Mabel to have got an immortal goat or fire-breathing chicken as a pet.

Home is a comforting place, with the Piedmont suburbs and very occasional supernatural creature, but you always feel like you belong at Gravity Falls far more than you do in California. It was pretty much all perfect until. Well. You’ve tried to stop thinking about it.

You used to be able to go for months without thinking about Grunkle Ford, but it’s been a few weeks since his second phone call, and nothing about him felt right. He was soft, and scared, and angry, but the Ford you’ve known since you were twelve was gentle and kind and… And, well, he was still scared a lot, but when you were all together, Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford and Dipper and Mabel and Soos and Abuelita, it was a family and it was okay and Wendy would come around and talk to Ford about science stuff and Grunkle Ford would be happy. The Ford on the phone wasn’t happy. You don’t want to think about the Ford on the phone.

So, well, you don’t. You just let Mabel carry you off to weird places and hang out with the Multibear and the girl gang that formed the autumn after Weirdmageddon and with your family, but never all at the same time, because when everyone was gathered into the living room there was always a huge gap that should be filled by quiet humming and polydactyl hands flickering.

Nevertheless, the summer feels more like a washed-out watercolour than the vibrant technicolour it used to be, and you don’t know if it’s because you’re nearly sixteen or because Ford is gone and you don’t know if he’s okay, and you send him a couple of texts at some point but he doesn’t reply to them. So you send more, and he doesn’t reply to those either, and Mabel can tell that you’re stressed about something because she keeps raising an eyebrow and looks pointedly between your chewed-up pen and you and, woah, you did _not_ realise that you’d even started chewing on that.

It was a really nice pen, too.

“Dipper, this is getting kind of weird,” she says one day when you’re both about to go to sleep.

You smirk at her, knowing exactly how to avoid the point and evade having to talk about what’s been going on for a while. “We are in a town that literally causes weirdness to arrive in its borders,” you reply.

“You know what I mean,” she sighs, and you do, but if you tell her about it then she’ll be just as scared as you.

And, well, you could continue avoiding the subject, but that would just make her even more worried, so you just say, “It’s personal.”

Mabel pouts, and yeah, she’s gonna needle you for it now. “Has someone been bullying you?”

“No, Mabel, why would someone bully me?” you say, squinting.

She pauses, holding a hand up in a loose fist like a paw, and seems to consider her reply. Which, great, that means more time to avoid the subject of Ford.

Wait.

You stand up slowly.

Mabel doesn’t move.

Maybe if…

You walk out the room, and Mabel doesn’t stop you.

You might have broken your sister, but at least you got to avoid your emotional issues, and as Mabel always says, you’ve got to look on the bright side of things!

She doesn’t confront you like that again for the rest of the summer. She just hugs you even more than usual when you look even the slightest bit sad, and gives you a look that means that she wants to talk but won’t, out of respect or something. She probably hasn’t figured it out yet. That’s okay. She doesn’t need to. It would only worry her more.

Your birthday is less subdued than last year, and when you turn sixteen your friends all crowd around you, trying to hide the gap in your family that had still, somehow, been left for Grunkle Ford.

 

-

 

Mabel’s been doing pretty well in junior year, having befriended everyone in the school yet again, and you can’t even count the amount of people who have asked you to pass on party invites to her. For some reason, she only ends up going if you go too, and this Halloween party is no exception.

Well, to be honest, Halloween parties in general are the reason that the rule exists. Even though you’re sixteen, Mabel is still adamant that you dress up in matching costumes. Last year, she was a Phantom Bust-Ifier and you were the scientist who invented the Bust-Ification devices, while Waddles got to be the ghost, though he was kept on a leash the entire time. Mabel had brought a lot of snacks in gratitude, and Waddles only ate a third of them.

There were a _lot_ of snacks.

Mabel’s gone with Waddles to get more fabric for you both to be Yin-Yang dragons, since apparently she didn’t have enough, so you’re stuck adding glitter carefully to the ridges of the headpiece to make it shimmer mysteriously. It’s slow, but you’re getting better at it, and you’ve studied enough dragons to understand their facial structure and make them sparkle in the right places.

The glitter sticks to your fingers and clothes, but that’s been happening since Mabel learnt what glitter was and got her first jar of it when she was four. It just feels like second nature to you now; navigating the world while looking like a disco ball sneezed on you. It’s calming to see the specks sparkle in the light, just like how Mabel looks all the time.

Your phone rings, and for a second, you think that Mabel’s calling you to tell you that she’ll be back soon, and that the fabric has sequins and it’s awesome, but your phone is displaying the default grey face and Ford’s name while the classic Jasmine City theme from MonsterMon plays. Before the first few notes finish playing, you’ve picked up the phone, running a hand through your hair.

“Grunkle Ford!” you beam. “How are you?”

He doesn’t answer, but you can hear his breathing, stilted and soft, through the receiver.

“Grunkle Ford?” you repeat, trying not to sound as scared as you feel.

“Dipper,” he finally says, sounding like a man who has walked for days in the desert to finally find a distant oasis. “Dipper, you’re here.”

“Yes, Grunkle Ford, I’m here,” you say. “I’m here in Piedmont. Do you need anything?”

He’s quiet for a moment. “Tell Stanley and Mabel that I love them both. I, I love you too. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry, Grunkle Ford?” you ask, you fingers clenching around the phone and loosening again.

“I’m sorry, I…” His voice softens, and you strain to hear him. “I’m going to kill myself, Dipper.”

The world stops.

You misheard that, right? You mean, your brain’s kind of tired from all of this glitter. Maybe some got in your ear and blocked it a bit?

“Um, what?” you ask, smiling a little desperately.

“I’m going to kill myself,” he repeats. “I just thought that I should alert you a day or so before I do, so that none of you will be shocked.”

You want to speak; to interrupt him; to tell him that he shouldn’t, he _can’t_ , he needs to _fix_ his family, not break it even more, but he interrupts you.”

“You’re my next of kin, you know,” he says. “Wendy’s listed as the executor of my will, so you won’t have to deal with that in addition to disposing of my corpse.”

“Where are you?” you ask. Your brain is running at a thousand miles an hour and you can barely understand your emotions past the sensation of being about to vomit, so your question might have sounded a little flat.

“Does it matter?” replies Grunkle Ford.

You try to control your breathing and your tone of voice as you say, “ _Yes_.”

He makes a snorting sound through his nose, just like Grunkle Stan does sometimes, and you can almost imagine the way his nostrils flare as he smiles emptily. “I suppose you will need to be able to access my body for burial or cremation.”

And he rattles off his address like he’s ordering a takeout, and not like he’s making plans for his own-

You remember what he says. You usually can’t remember a single thing when people talk to you over the phone, but you don’t think that you’ll ever be able to forget a word of this conversation.

“I’m sorry,” Ford says as you go to the kitchen and pack a rucksack with snacks and bottled water and caffeine pills from the medicine cabinet. “I didn’t think it would get to this, but I tried leaving and it didn’t work. I’ll never be able to leave.”

“What are you trying to leave?” you ask, pulling on your jacket and checking the pockets for your wallet. Good, it’s there. Mabel’s driver’s license is still provisional, but you passed your test on the first try a couple of weeks ago. You thought that your first long drive would be to Gravity Falls next summer or a trip to Portland to see Wendy; not to Dodge City, Kansas. Not for _this_.

A moment later, you wish that you hadn’t asked the question.

“Bill,” he says. “He’s in my dreams every night. I see him, I-I see his eyes looking out of Stanley’s face, and I thought it would go away when I left but it _hasn’t_. It’s never going away. And I deserve it.”

“You don’t deserve anything bad that happened to you, Grunkle Ford!” you reply, and it comes out loud and angry instead of reassuring; of course it does.

He laughs bitterly. “I caused the apocalypse, Dipper. I didn’t even fix it; Stanley did and I just stood around being _useless_.”

“You’re not useless, and you weren’t useless then,” you reply, pulling your shoes on. “You helped destroy Bill.”

“I killed my brother. It may not have been permanent, but I held the gun and I pulled the trigger and when he woke up we all thought that he was gone forever,” growls Grunkle Ford. “And if he’d stayed gone, frankly, I’d have been able to do this a lot earlier. But _no_ , for a while I thought that everything would turn out alright. I was naïve and stupid, and I let myself get too close to all of you. At least now that I’ve removed myself from your lives, you three won’t notice a difference with me being alive or dead.”

Gum. Mabel likes gum. Gum will calm her down, especially bubblemint. Where’s the bubblemint? Ah, it’s on the top shelf. Your parents use it as a bribe sometimes, but Mabel still hasn’t finished growing and she’s set to be taller than you so she’s been able to get the gum more easily than your parents could.

“They miss you,” you say, and you want to say more, but Grunkle Ford makes the noise through his nose again, sounding sadder than before.

“They still think about me,” murmurs Ford. “They still want me to stick around.”

“Yes,” you reply, smiling, because maybe he won’t do it, and maybe you can pick him up from his house and bring him home to Gravity Falls and stay there and watch dumb movies and research the local wildlife, even though Grunkle Ford hadn’t seemed enthusiastic about doing that for the past few years.

“Then there’s no way out,” he says flatly. “I thought that I could leave nobody behind to mourn me, but you all _still_ insist on caring about me.”

“We all love you, Grunkle Ford,” you say. “Please don’t leave us.”

“I have to.”

His voice is quiet but steely. You can hear the roughness beneath his modulated baritone that sounds just a trace like Grunkle Stan’s smoker’s lungs.

“I have to do this. If I live, I’ll see him, and I… I wanted to hurt Stanley when I woke from those nightmares,” he says. “I thought he was Bill. Sometimes, they both seem so similar. If I die, it’ll all be over, and you and your family will get over it.”

“ _Our_ family,” you say. “They’re _our_ family. You can’t just… You can’t just distance yourself from them and pretend it’s all okay!”

“Technicalities,” huffs Ford as you hear the minivan that you and Mabel share pull into the driveway. Apparently, Ford hears it too, because the next thing he says is, “You can set off tomorrow, if you must. I’ll… I’ll be a while. I need to make preparations.”

And your hand clenches round the phone, because this is your last chance and if you’re lucky you might get to him before he goes cold, and you shout, forgetting all etiquette about being on the phone and you’re gripped by the sudden understanding that he’s going to die, and you shout, “Grunkle Ford!”

“Goodbye, Dipper,” he says. “Tell Stanley and Mabel that I love them both.”

 

-

 

And he hangs up and _there isn’t time_. You bolt out of the door, shoving your phone into your jacket pocket and gripping your rucksack strap.

Mabel isn’t even out of the minivan when you launch yourself into the passenger seat and you shout, “Get driving!”

She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to the world, because she turns the key in the ignition again and the minivan sputters into life. A split second later, she reverses out of the driveway as Waddles oinks from the entire backseat area, and you’re on the road. You pull out the map from the glovebox and desperately unfold it until you connect a line between Piedmont and Kansas.

“Get on the Interstate Five,” you say, squinting at the map. You shouldn’t have skipped the optometrist appointment, because you probably do need glasses after all. It doesn’t matter. That can wait until later. It has to.

“North or south?” asks Mabel, almost breaking the speed limit.

“South.”

It’s difficult to focus, but you grab a pencil from the glovebox and trace a line along what seems to be the quickest route. You’ll have to take the Interstate Forty before going onto Route Fifty-Four, and you’re going to have to break several speed limits, and pee breaks will also be driver switches, and there’s only a slight chance that by the time you get there that Grunkle Ford will even be alive, but these are all risks you’ll have to take. You’re a Pines. You have to do this.

You switch to driving at Needles, after you took a toilet break and told Mabel why you were taking this road trip. Not that she didn’t want to go, but she didn’t understand why, since it was Sunday. So you told her to pull over, and when you explained why, she almost threw up. At least Waddles is in the back to comfort her.

The sun sets when you’re halfway through Arizona, and Mabel’s been sleeping for the past five hours with Waddles’s head on her lap. You smile as you look at her in the rear-view mirror, taking another caffeine pill from the blister pack before swallowing it dry. You rip open a sachet of Sparkle Dip with your teeth. Mabel had been over the moon last year when you had discovered what appeared to be Smile Dip’s less-hallucinogenic Canadian cousin, and the memory brings a smile to your face as you chug down the cola flavour without using the candy stick. It’s just as well; the packs of three only come with two sticks, so one sachet would always be destined for that fate. Mabel will be happier with the cherry and bubblegum flavours anyway.

When Mabel wakes up a few hours later, you toss those unused sachets back towards her, along with a sandwich bag of some of Waddles’s special pig food. Both girl and pig devour their treats with a ravenous joy, and you pull over in a layby to pee for the first time in quite a while.

Waddles is enthusiastic about the roadside, but Mabel makes sure to keep him out any danger and pets him when he does his piggy business in a safe area. They walk backwards and forwards around the spot next to the minivan for a while as you fill up the gas with the tank you keep in the boot, before Mabel lifts Waddles back in the van and gets in the driver’s seat.

“You okay doing that?” you ask, but your voice is kind of slurred with exhaustion.

Mabel laughs. “Better than you, dummy,” she replies, and you get in the passenger seat. Mabel turns the engine on until she’s revving to go, then she stomps down on the gas like it had wronged her deeply, and you’re kind of glad that you fall asleep then because Mabel running purely on Sparkle Dip is an incomprehensible horror.

She lets you sleep until you wake up naturally in the middle of a road that is surrounded both sides by dry grass that blurs at the high Speed that Mabel drives at.

“We’re almost in Kansas,” she says, her voice rough.

You rummage in the side of the door before pulling out a plastic bottle and pulling it open. When you put it to her mouth, she gulps it down like a thirsty hamster, leaving only a third of the water behind.

“Thanks,” she sighs, accelerating.

“Mabel, pull over,” you say, after taking a few sips.

“We don’t have _time_ ,” she replies, hissing through her gritted teeth.

You can see Mabel’s shoulders tremble as she grips the steering wheel with white knuckles. The whites of her eyes are pink and bloodshot and you repeat, “Pull _over_.”

“ _Why_?” she yells.

“You’re going to hurt yourself!” you reply. “You’re exhausted, Mabel! Just let me help you!”

She screams wordlessly, swerving off of the empty word. Waddles squeals fearfully from the back seat, and Mabel freezes in silence. It would have been funny if it weren’t for the situation, you think. She unbuckles her seatbelt and slides out of the door before climbing into the backseat. Waddles oinks quietly, and you lean back to pass Mabel some of the pig food. After doing what you need to, you start up the minivan again and accelerate until you’re crossing the Kansas border and looking for signs to Dodge City.

“We’re gonna be too late,” you think you hear Mabel mumble from the backseat, but you can’t give up. There’s still a chance that he’s alive, like Schrodinger’s Cat or something, and you’re running on the adrenaline that your desperate hope gives you.

 

-

 

You slow down when you enter the outskirts of the city. You looked up his address in the van; it’s around here _somewhere_ , and you can’t waste your time on looking for a street when Ford could be-

 _There_.

You remember the street name, and the number, and you swerve to get there as quickly as you can. A passing car beeps at you but how could you care? Ford is in that one-storey house, and his driveway is empty so you park in there and you pound on the door because he’s there, and he’s got to be alive!

You try to open the door; barely breathing in what could be desperation or panic or both and a mix of other things that you can’t identify; and miraculously, somehow, it’s not locked and the handle slides down with a click as you push and you stumble in through the doorway, making floorboard creak under your hands that were flung out to stop your fall.

It’s dusty and you have to take your inhaler out of your pocket as Mabel hurries in, Waddles following behind her.

“Grunkle Ford!” she shouts, and as though in reply, something thuds in the back room.

Mabel sprints to the cause of the sound, while you scramble after her desperately as Waddles squeals in distress. You can barely feel the carpet under your hands because of all the dust and dirt it’s covered in, and you push yourself up into a forwards-leaning run.

It’s not that hard to find Ford. You could probably count the amount of rooms in the house on one hand, and even then it only takes a few long steps until you can see Grunkle Ford.

If you didn’t know better, you would think that a stranger had dressed up as Ford and began to live in his house, but his eyes are the same as they always were; like Mabel’s and Stan’s and yours. The rest of his body is thin under his loose old turtleneck; his holster is still slung around his shoulder as it always has been, but with a few extra ray guns and pistols that you don’t think he used to carry before; and his trenchcoat is wrapped around his shoulders like a child with a safety blanket. As his expression falls from dull resignation to fear, you notice how sallow his skin has gotten, and how stained his teeth have become.

All this you see in one moment, because Mabel flings her arms around Grunkle Ford and holds him closely against her chest, whispering, “You’re alive, you’ll be okay, I’m here, Dipper’s here, we’re going to look after you-“

“No!” shouts Ford, and he couldn’t have the strength to push Mabel away so she must have let go from shock, and Ford continues. “I’m not going back! I can’t go back, so just _leave_ me!”

Again, you find yourself with a lump in your throat that feels like a gag. You can’t speak. You can’t _think_. You can only see.

You can’t see her face, but you see Mabel’s fingers twitch. “Why can’t you go back?” she asks quietly. At least, you think she does, because her voice is soft and you doubt that Ford heard her clearly, if at all.

Ford smiles bitterly, and something about the expression rings false. “I overdosed on several things that will give me acute liver failure. I called before I took them, because I didn’t think that you kids would be _stupid_ enough to look for me.”

“It’s not stupid!” Mabel responds as you begin to walk closer to the two of them. “It’s how we _work_! Because you’re our Grunkle, so you’re our family, so we take care of you!”

“You don’t have to,” he sighs.

“We _want_ to,” Mabel shoots back.

Ford folds his arms. “Well then, _I_ don’t want you to.”

There is silence for a moment, then you hear a sob. And another. Mabel… She’s _crying_?

This shouldn’t be a surprise; she’s been crying a lot in the van, but for some reason it feels like you’ve been punched in the gut. It’s probably also because of Grunkle Ford, you decide, but he doesn’t look like he’s crying. He doesn’t look like he feels anything at all.

“Why?” she asks, her voice cracking to fit around her tears.

Ford shrugs. “It’s not your choice as to whether or not I die. It’s entirely my own, and I want to die.”

Mabel screams a little, and you jolt at the noise. “That’s what I don’t understand! What’s so bad; what’s so wrong that you want to-“

She doesn’t finish that sentence.

“Of course you don’t understand,” Ford says quietly, and his stoic mask cracks to reveal a smile that was still, somehow, full of love. “You’re Mabel. I never want you to understand this.”

“What if I do?”

Mabel takes Ford’s hand and links her fingers with his. Ford’s eyes are wide, and he’s started to shake.

“What if I do end up feeling that way?” continues Mabel. “What if I get depression too? Grunkle Stan has it, so I know what it is, but I don’t have it. But what if I do end up getting it? What happens then?”

Ford looks like he’s about to be sick, and your stomach sinks. You’ve got a feeling that this conversation will do nothing for Ford except make him feel worse.

“How is that supposed to help?” he asks. “Are you trying to guilt me into staying alive?”

“No!” Mabel replies. “Yes… Maybe, I don’t know! But please, stay with us. Just try, please.”

“You really don’t understand,” he sighs. “I can’t. No matter what happens, I’m trapped. You want me to stay alive but I can’t.”

“Yes you can!” says Mabel, and you can hear the desperation in her voice where nobody else ever does; distant but strong.

“I’m glad that you believe in me that much, but this was always going to happen,” Ford murmurs. “The only reason you even _met_ me was because I had to destroy Bill Cipher before killing myself. It’s a shame I hung on for so long afterwards.”

“But you stayed,” Mabel argues softly. “You stayed with us, even then. Why can’t you stay with us now?”

He sighs and clenches his fists. “I made a mistake, Mabel. I kept finding excuses to stay with Stanley and be his brother, but I couldn’t forget Bill. Everything that happened started in that house. I woke up every morning back in the mental state that I was in after his betrayal, or even worse, when I was still under his thumb. Most days, I woke up and wanted to _die_ , Mabel.”

“Well, wanting to doesn’t mean you should!” she replies, pouting. Well, you describe it as a pout, but you don’t know how to describe most of the things Mabel does when she’s scared and straining to make a difference.

Grunkle Ford’s face crumples a little, and for a moment you let yourself hope that he might back down and let you and Mabel take him to a hospital, but then he speaks.

“I’m old, kids, and I’ve done what I can with my life. Please, just let me die.”

You think that you start crying, but Mabel’s turned cold and still, and she’s like a statue and you don’t know what to _do_.

“Grunkle Ford,” Mabel’s voice says, soft and frightened and for a moment you think that she’s twelve again and you’re both scared at the new weirdness in the world.

“Yes?” he replies, and he stumbles at the end of the question and you swear that he was going to call her a pet name, like dear or love or sweetie, but you don’t _know_.

“I’m sorry.”

She grabs his wrists and holds him against her chest. He tries to wriggle free, but Mabel still picks up Waddles to cuddle him and she is ridiculously muscular and there is no way that Ford can get away from her grip.

“Dipper, get in the car!”

“What?” you yelp, eyes widening. “What are you doing?”

“Just get in the car and drive us to the hospital, Dipper!” screeches Mabel, and you obey, even though your hands are shaking and you’re half-wondering if this counts as kidnapping.

You mean, well, if it does, how are you supposed to justify yourself to the courts? Are you going to go to jail? You turn the keys in the ignition and stomp on the gas as Ford wriggles pathetically in the backseat, held down by Mabel. Waddles is squealing loudly in the seats behind Mabel and Ford, and the radio turns on automatically, and you can’t hear your own thoughts.

Just follow the signposts. Just follow them. Ignore Ford’s anger, even if it is the most emotion you’ve seen from him in years, now you think of it; ignore Mabel muffling her sobs poorly; ignore every bone in your body that tells you that what you’re doing is wrong, because the alternative is much worse.

You turn a corner too sharply and in the mirror you can see Grunkle Ford throwing up a little bit on his lap, which you try to ignore. The smell fills up the car and Mabel rolls down her window. You try to ignore it. You just need to get to the hospital.

As Mabel pulls Ford out of the car and into the huge building, she screams for a doctor and you just sit in the car uselessly, just staring at the dashboard. You don’t even take your seatbelt off as Waddles snores in the back. You just breathe softly, waiting to wake up from this nightmare.


	2. see your soul

You don’t know why you called Dipper. You were scared and kind of drunk probably, but you just wanted someone to know that you were going to die, and that it wasn’t… Well. That it wasn’t an accident. Fat lot of use it did in the end, because no matter what you said Mabel wouldn’t give up and you were kept in intensive care for a week before being left in the care of two teenagers.

You feel sick. They’re taking you across the country back to Gravity Falls, and you don’t want to be there, but when Mabel called Stanley you spoke to him for the first time in over a year and he begged that you come back home. You would have refused and stayed in Dodge City for the rest of your hopefully short life, but your damned conscience reminded you of the fact that all that your brother had wanted for the past thirty or forty years was his brother back, even though it was inconceivably stupid of him.

Not only that, you had heard Stanley Pines beg for you to come home.

So, like an honour-bound veteran of some forgotten war, you sit in the back seat with Waddles as Dipper and Mabel avoid speaking to each other or you past occasional pleasantries, like an observation on the weather or _do you need to go to the toilet, Grunkle Ford?_ or _do you need some water, Grunkle Ford?_ or _how about you stop being such a lazy waste of space and leave, Grunkle Ford?_

Well, not the last one, clearly. Because you’re still here, even though your mind keeps reminding you of every single way your environment could be used to kill you. For some reason, Dipper and Mabel unintentionally decided to torture you by not only preventing your death, but also by taking you back to Gravity Falls.

You’ve spent so many years trapped in that town. Okay, you spent more time trapped in the multiverse unable to return home, but back then you had a purpose. Destroying Bill Cipher was all that you lived for. Then you killed him and your brother, got your brother back, and had to stay out of a sense of duty towards Stanley. He wanted to mend his bond with you, and you wanted to die, but Stan deserves everything he wants from life, and if what he wanted was your friendship and camaraderie, then so be it.

When you left Gravity Falls, it was your first selfish action since the apocalypse ended. It worked out about as well as everything else in your life. Even your suicide attempt was a failure of incomprehensible proportions.

Mabel stops in a motel car park and pokes Dipper until he gets out of the car. You follow, being guided by Waddles, and stare blankly as Mabel uses gestures and intonations that Stanley must have taught her to get a room for three people and a pig.

 

-

 

When you finally see your old house again, your senses are dulled by sleep, though your skin is beginning to crawl. It’s midday, you suppose, from the height of the sun in the sky, but there are no tourists outside the Mystery Shack. Instead, Stanley sits alone on the porch, and when he sees the van, he pushes himself into a standing position and staggers down the porch. Mabel parks roughly in front of the Shack, and Dipper opens your door.

As soon as you get out, your brother is clinging to you with a grip you couldn’t loosen if you could be bothered to try.

He whispers things that you don’t really process. _How could you you’re okay I was so scared I missed you how are you I_ -

“I’m glad y-you’re back,” he says, his voice choked, and you can hear the unsaid words like _alive_ and _here_ and _okay_ , but you know that you’re not alright and barely alive and so does Stanley, because you’ve lived in a house with him for years and he can read you like a book. He knows exactly how you feel, and he wishes he didn’t.

“You two should go inside,” Dipper says, and Stanley breaks away from you a little but keeps one arm wrapped around your shoulders.

“Yes, of course,” your brother says, and guides you up the porch steps and through the door and into the kitchen.

The house feels different, somehow. It looks the same, with each floorboard exactly as you remember. Some trinkets have been shifted around, making way for new jars filled with glitter and photographs and action figures, and you glance at each one, knowing that there must be a deeper meaning behind each object, but you don’t care about that.

Stan sits you on a kitchen chair, and it’s just as uncomfortable as it was before you left.

“So, uh, do you want anything to drink?” he asks. He pauses, then adds, “Coffee? Tea? Water?”

Well, you’re not going to ask for alcohol from the person who tried to get you to quit multiple times, so you just grunt, “Coffee,” and hope that you can add a little something from your flask to make the sensation of your crawling skin fade.

Stanley busies himself with the coffee machine, and gets two mugs out of the cabinet. He has to reach to the back to get your favourite, which Dipper got you. It has a picture of Bigfoot in a lab coat, and to be honest, it was the best thing you had ever seen when he showed it to you over the kitchen table one day. You don’t really care for it now.

He sets your coffee in front of you, then turns away after a glance that tells you that he knows exactly what you’re doing, but at least he lets you get a little bit further from sobriety. Technically you shouldn’t be drinking after what you’d done to your liver, but if Stanley complained about it, he’d be a hypocrite and you could tell the entire family all of his little secrets that he’d confessed during late nights when you were both drunk and pretending to watch shitty movies. If the kids knew half of what you know about Stanley, they’d be wrestling him to the hospital instead of you and maybe you could finally catch a few minutes to yourself in the kitchen or on the rafters or anywhere besides here with your pulse still throbbing with aching lifeblood.

He’s watching you now as though he can read your mind. Such a thought is ridiculous, but you know that Stanley would love to have a power like that. He could get all of the customers and all of the girls flocking to him and nobody could lie to him like how he lies to them.

You kind of want a cigarette, but instead you just drink the last dregs of your spiked coffee. It’s gone lukewarm. Have you really spent so long just staring at it?

“I didn’t think you would come back,” Stanley says.

“Neither did I,” you reply, staring at the bottom of your mug.

Stanley shifts in his seat. You don’t see it, because you’re still staring at your mug, but you hear it quite clearly, even with the kids running around up to their attic bedroom.

Finally, he says, “Why did you leave in the first place?”

You shrug. “I wanted to.”

A thud. Stanley’s hand probably fell onto the table after he ran it through his hair, trying to gesture towards you empathetically but failing out of tiredness. Yes, you can see it in your peripheral vision. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

You do, on some level, you suppose. This was a conversation that you had imagined playing out two summers ago and even before then, only in future tense instead of past, but the version of you back then was always walking on eggshells, because Stanley cared and you cared and you never wanted to hurt each other ever again. But nowadays you look at your family, and think about them, and you feel nothing but a detached sense of aching loneliness, like the hunger pangs of a starved man on a barren planet who had given up on finding food or shelter or the sole meaning that he can give his pathetic life. Not like you know that from experience, obviously, or anything, though the general sentiment still remains

But you can’t say that. That’s secret; all of it is. Just open up and say _one_ thing, Stanford Pines. Give _one damn reason_ as to why you left all of your family behind when you were all set to grow old and die surrounded by people who love you.

“It was suffocating,” you say.

Stanley’s hand clenches into a fist, but his voice stays soft and gentle, like you’re on your deathbed and not trying to get a little buzzed so that you can cope with your pathetic intolerance for life at the kitchen table in the middle of the day. “The town or me?”

You shrug.

It’s a good enough answer for Stanley, since he doesn’t ask anything else. He barely even looks at you.

 

-

 

You’re not entirely sure how she did it, but Mabel has somehow secured both herself and Dipper places at Gravity Falls High School after a few lengthy phone conversations with her parents, and one very short one with the Gravity Falls High School Reception. They won’t start, apparently, until November, which gives Stanley a lot of time to skirt child labour laws and set them up in the Mystery Shack’s gift shop. It also gives you a lot of time to use the twins as distractions so that your family doesn’t notice when you’ve gone down to the basement.

Stanley says that you mope down there, while he laughs uncomfortably, barely hiding his concern and fear behind his grin. Once, you might have responded with a retort on how it wasn’t moping, and then Stan would ask you what it was, and you wouldn’t have an answer so you would instead play with the kids or read a book or watch Ducktective with Stanley. Now you just shrug and go back to your moping. Definitely just moping going on down there. Absolutely no self-destructive behaviours whatsoever.

You’re a shitty liar, but you’re only putting the bare minimum of effort in nowadays.

It’s not like you could kill yourself in the basement. Stanley knows all of your secret hideaway spots from the thirty years he spent in your house, and all of the guns have been cleared away and hidden somewhere. And it’s not like you’d be able to slit your wrists or anything, because the closest thing that you have to a knife now is a plastic pencil sharpener with the blade superglued down.

You wouldn’t do it anyway now. You’re too tired.

Every so often, Stanley or Mabel will come to take you upstairs, and they will sit with you and talk about inane things like the weather or Ducktective. Sometimes, Stanley will go quiet and just watch you, as though he’s trying to look into your soul or something. There probably wouldn’t be anything to find though. You’re just an empty husk.

Soos tried to get your help in building new things with the knowledge that you accrued from other dimensions, but halfway through your first project together you just couldn’t do it anymore. Well, you could, but you’re awful and lazy and hollow now, like the chocolate Santa Claus that Mabel shared with you even though it’s only November. Whenever you think of doing anything, you feel so drained and empty that you just want to curl up in your bed and drink until you pass out.

You sometimes see Dipper when you come out of the basement. You don’t talk to him, no matter how much you might want to. He just makes awkward eye contact and scurries off, not even bothering to make an excuse.

It’s just as well, since you can’t find the words that you want to say to him.

He… You trusted him to wait and then deal with your corpse. Well, you trusted him with a lot more than that. And every time, he’s ignored your wishes and told all of your secrets. Stanley had asked you about your job playing piano at some point, and pressed until you had to tell him that you were fired for stealing from the workplace. He laughed and slapped your back before stopping abruptly. Then he made a half-assed attempt at an apology which you accepted, because what else could you do?

You want to blame Dipper for everything, like sharing your secrets and saving your life, but you _can’t_. He just wanted to help, and you went around screwing everything up like always. You should have died. You wanted to die. But Dipper brought Mabel and Mabel forced you to go to the hospital and have your stomach pumped and you can’t blame Mabel because she only ever wants what’s best for you. It’s just that you don’t want what’s best for you, but for some stupid, absurd reason, your family does.

For example, Mabel knits you a cardigan one day. Well, she probably doesn’t do it in one day, you think, before shaking your head. You have seen her knit plush covers for all of the kitchen chairs in a weekend because Soos’s grandmother mentioned that the wooden seats were uncomfortable. You know that your great-niece is capable of knitting any item of clothing in two hours at most. Well, most clothing. A wedding dress would probably take a day or so, depending on the amount of decoration.

She arrives in the basement with thudding footsteps that she doesn’t usually have, and you turn in your office chair at the desk in the portal’s old control room, closing the book that you had open on the desk for something to pretend to do.

“Voila!” she beams, shaking out the indigo folds of fabric in her arms to reveal a cardigan patterned with shimmering silver constellations.

You blink. This is quite frankly an unexpected turn of events. You had never said anything about wanting any kind of cardigan ever; not even one with Orion and Gemini and Ursa Major dotted over it in patterns that utterly defy all accurate star maps of this dimension.

“Thank you?” you reply, because you’re still not entirely sure why Mabel is showing you this cardigan. It’s far too small for her, and she’s showing it to you, ergo it is likely to be _for_ you. This theory is confirmed when Mabel presses it into your arms and demands that you try it on while bouncing on the balls of her feet.

It fits really well. It feels heavier than other knitwear that you have tried, but when you pat the hem it’s bulky and filled with what seems to be little metal and plastic pellets.

Mabel seems to notice, because her smile widens. “Dipper does really well with weighted vests and jackets, so I thought that you might be the same, and it’s alpaca wool because it’s soft and huggy and I love you!”

You force a smile onto your face. This is good, and you think that you like the design as well as the thought and the pressure it adds to your shoulders, but you just can’t really feel any emotions right now. “It’s great,” you say. “Thank you, Mabel.”

You don’t say so, but you expect her to leave when you sit back down and turn away from Mabel. Unsurprisingly, she stays hovering over you, which is rather annoying when you’re trying to get through this ridiculous prison that your mind and so-called intellect has become over the years, or at least you’re trying to dull it away like how the ocean erodes even the sturdiest rocks.

“Grunkle Ford, come on!” Mabel says, and you must have zoned out, because she’s pulling you into the elevator and bringing you into the living room. “We’re having a marathon of Return Backwards to the Past Again!”

You blink and shake your head. “I’m not really…”

Too late. You’re already in Stanley’s chair, while your brother sits on a huge pile of mattresses and cushions that seem to be housing the entire family, with the exception of Soos’s abuelita and Wendy, who is apparently in college right now. Dipper and Stan are leaning on Soos, who seems to be quite comfortable to sit with; while Mabel puts her head on your shoulder as Dipper starts the first movie.

You must have fallen asleep at some point, because you don’t remember much past the first half-hour, but when you wake up, Mabel is right next to you, and a blanket has been wrapped over both of you as the sun rises through the window.

 

-

 

And one day, you feel like coffee, so you drag your feet upstairs and into the kitchen.

Well, it’s dark outside, so everyone’s asleep, but it’s early in the morning and you’ve barely moved in the past few days, so you could do with an energy boost.

You find the jar of coffee beans next to the coffee machine, and when you take the lids off of both of those objects you see that there is still a teaspoon in the jar. Your mouth twitches upwards for a moment when you remember that it’s most likely Stanley’s fault. He’s always been a ridiculous slob. Hopefully he’s not rubbing off on the kids. You can only deal with so much mess.

Well, you _could_ only deal with so much mess. The past tense is important. You’re not around the house much anymore, and even if you were, you probably wouldn’t care about the trash left lying around over the floor in the most ridiculous of places.

You root around in the cupboard where the cups and plates are kept to find your Loch Ness Monster mug. It tells you to _believe in yourself_! You’re pretty sure that the Loch Ness Monster is a group of selkies playing a prank on humans. But the weird fake monster looks so goofy and enthusiastic that you feel a little pang in your gut.

No, that’s hunger. You need food.

What do people usually eat? Caviar? Mustard? Glitter? No, glitter is a Mabel thing. Most humans would probably lose a kidney if they ate what Mabel eats.

Bread. Bread seems relatively safe.

At some point, somebody invested in a bread bin. That makes your job a lot easier, and you just pull out the pack of sliced bread, take a slice, and put it to your mouth, and bite into it and-

Well. You can afford to not narrate every single thing that you do in your mind, even though it’s taking all of your focus to stand and eat bread while waiting for your coffee to finish brewing.

It tastes kind of bland. So does your coffee, when it’s brewed, but that might be because your tastebuds are burnt now. You probably should have waited to drink it, but that doesn’t matter.

You’re already drained from being upstairs for so long. You catch your reflection occasionally in the pitch-black window, and sometimes it seems to move when you’re completely still. That’s probably just your head filling in the blanks, you decide, because you’re a ridiculous, paranoid old man. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows you’d be better off gone.

This is tiring. You’re tiring. Or maybe you’re just tired. You want to go back to sleep for a while, but there are nightmares, and you just want to be blank, see nothing, do nothing, _be_ nothing.

Who cares? As you walk back to the vending machine, having finished your bread and leaving your empty coffee mug in the sink, you decide that you might as well try to go to sleep, no matter how futile your attempt might be.

 

-

 

You keep going upstairs after that. It’s always to get something to drink, like water or coffee or mind-numbing alcohol. Stanley keeps you stocked, though he does seem to be keeping less of it in the kitchen now. Or maybe he’s buying less. Or maybe he’s drinking his fair share to try and get rid of all of the horrors and guilt in his own head, and you’re just getting the leftovers.

A momentary vindictive pleasure runs through you. He deserves this. He deserves to feel this way. He has to, because you _have_ to be the better twin; the smarter and more capable and, you don’t know, the _good_ twin. _He_ deserves to feel sick and empty and hollow and like every word he says is a lie. But that pleasure is short-lived, because you’re wrong.

You’re wrong about a lot of things, because you’re stupid and useless and a monster, and you deserved to lose everything forever during Weirdmageddon. You deserved to die in that portal. Let someone else deal with killing Bill. You deserved to be captured and sold as a freak show or a slave or an exotic pet to some intergalactic sadist. You should have died in chains and agony, writhing in a pile of your own blood and vomit. You deserved to be humiliated, tortured; anything _but_ loved. You deserved to be mocked and forgotten; an insignificant rotting corpse on a distant planet in a dead dimension.

This is a very macabre train of thought for a lunch consisting of a slice of toast with jam and two soft crackers.

You try to eat it all, but the toast feels like sandpaper as you chew it into mush and gulp it down your throat. It settles in your stomach with a weight like an anvil, and you decide that it might be better to stick to liquids for now. Specifically, the newest couple of bottles of vodka in the cupboard. You mean, you could stick with something healthy for you, like orange juice or tea, but you haven’t deserved to live with a fully-functioning body since the eighties. Or maybe the seventies. Or maybe your whole life.

It doesn’t really matter how long you’re been a useless wreck for, because that’s how you are, and if getting drunk alone in the basement is how you’re going to be useless today, then so be it.

It’s a pretty good day, all in all, when you’re just dwelling in your selfish self-loathing in the basement, having not showered for about a week, and you’re getting out of your brain for a little while. You can do whatever you want like this!

Of course, you’ll always just choose to drink more, unless something miraculously takes your fancy for you to do, like research or art or anything, and you laugh because you haven’t done anything with your life since you helped start and finish an apocalypse.

A thought pops into your mind.

Now _that_ could be vaguely interesting.

You stagger to the elevator, tripping over your feet a little, and slouch against the wall as you ascend three floors in fifteen seconds, then drag your feet up the stairs, one-two-stumble-threefour-five.

The kitchen is empty, of course. It’s rather early in the morning. The various birds of Gravity Falls, like the blue tit and the sparrow and the Death Pigeon, all the birds scream in joy due to waking up and wanting to reproduce or whatever. You’ve never seen the appeal in that kind of thing, even during those brief periods of respite when your brain worked and you didn’t want to die constantly.

You go upstairs to the attic.

The first thing you’re struck by whenever you’re in that room is the window. It always feels like you’re being watched, even though Bill is gone and he can’t hurt you anymore, so you don’t have to worry about him seeing you in your most vulnerable moments

Dipper is awake, even though he could always do with more sleep, while Mabel looks like she won’t be walking up soon, even when you collapse on the end of her bed, pulling yourself into a sitting position and swallowing down a bit of bile.

“Grunkle Ford, what are you doing?” asks Dipper, and his face looks blurry even though you’re wearing your glasses.

“D-Dipper, my boy,” you mumble. “Why… I, yes, ah, I came up here to ask you if-“

You sway a little from where you’re sitting. Actually, it might have been a lot, since Dipper leaps up and pulls you into a more upright position.

“Grunkle Ford-“

“If I’d actually been able to kill myself, would you have told Stanley?”

The world goes blank, and you decide that you must be asleep for a minute, but then Dipper shifts and shakes you. You jolt back to complete alertness.

“Well?” you ask.

Dipper shakes his head. “Well, I’d have had to tell everyone that you’d died,” he said, “but if Grunkle Stan knew how, I… He…”

You wait patiently. You might fall asleep again, to be honest, and your blurry vision is testament to that fact, unless it’s just a normal side effect of being drunk. You don’t care. Dipper is being very slow and deliberate in his word choices and it is far more boring than you’d anticipated.

Finally, Dipper continued. “I wouldn’t have told him, because he might have killed himself too. He’s… He’s not in a good place, mentally. I don’t think he ever was, but his meds are helping him and-“

“Would he have believed you?” you ask.

Dipper looks away, and you think he shakes his head, but you’ve fallen asleep by then.

 

-

 

Upon achieving vague sobriety about half a day later, you regret the fact that your first interaction with your grandnephew since he had helped to prevent your suicide was about, well, your attempted suicide. Which you probably shouldn’t have mentioned.

The problem was that killing yourself was always on your mind. You thought that it was an exaggeration when, in books, the tragic hero would dwell upon his mistakes and constantly wish for death. Frankly, you had found the notion rather irritating, and those fictional men of legends and cautionary tales, the modern Prometheus freezing and dying and Doctor Faust being dragged to Hell, all of that was so _predictable_. Of course deals with demons and tearing apart the boundaries of life and death would leave one with enough guilt to weigh oneself down to the bottom of a lake.

Those mistakes had been repeated for centuries, and you had still fallen into them headfirst and without a trace of irony.

You could, quite often, ignore any outside input from other people about your problems. In fact, you had done so a lot in the past. Fiddleford warned you about Bill Cipher, to which your response was to cut Fiddleford out of your life and cry when Bill betrayed you. However, your mind could easily switch to neverending introspection upon a moment’s notice.

Well, it could be more accurately described as _wallowing in your own misery_ , but _introspection_ sounds better, quite frankly.

And the fact of the matter is that no matter how damned wonderful your life was, you had always, on some level, wanted to die.

The ocean crashed across the shore in your childhood, and some days you would wonder how it would feel to walk out into its steady waves and let yourself be washed away by the tide, with the broken bottles and driftwood that cluttered the shore along with that one half-built boat. During your adolescence, you acquired a book of Stevie Smith’s poems, and considered your heart giving way in the cold ocean, how it was too cold, always too cold. And then you’d hide the book under your pillow, thankful that Stanley was scared of heights and wouldn’t be able to find it.

During your college years, you would fantasise about starving to death, or throwing yourself off a bridge into the too-cold-always water. Fiddleford would brew moonshine under his bed and every month you would drink so much of it that you would black out for the entire weekend before going back to working with even more determination than before, because if you didn’t learn and show how much you’d learnt then you’d become a homeless bum leeching off of other people and dying in a gutter, absolutely humiliated and still, always, an irredeemable freak.

Even when you were in Gravity Falls, studying anomalies like yourself, you would sometimes stand on the edge of the cliffs that floated in the shape of a flying saucer and feel the wind blow through your fingers and hair, and imagine one particularly strong gust catching you like a leaf and pushing you off the edge, where the breeze would suddenly stop and let you fall, splattered on the ground like a grisly pancake.

When Bill had betrayed you, you tied the noose around the rafters and stuck your head through the dangling loop, letting your stubbly throat rest on the rope. You shouldn’t have been surprised that you had bungled your first suicide attempt, but you fell asleep just before you kicked the chair out from underneath you. A few hours later, you woke up in your underwear to see one of your anatomical skeletons based on a normal human being’s frame. You watched it slowly rotating as it hung from the ceiling, dressed sloppily in your clothes. Your stomach churned with envy as you realised that you had to stop Bill.

And through the portal, you came so close on deserted old planets, where you could barely breathe for the dust in the air, and barely walk for your empty stomach and emaciated body, and you would hold one of the guns from your extensive armoury under your chin for hours as you internally waged a war on the pros and cons of dying already before you starved, or before Bill’s goons found you, or before you gave up due to the cowardly delusion that you could _stop_ Bill.

The first night after Stanley had opened the portal, and Mabel had stopped you from destroying Bill before letting yourself be torn to shreds by the monsters of the Nightmare Realm, you seriously considered killing yourself. There were so many ways that you could do it. You could have stabbed yourself with scrap from the portal, or slit your wrists, or pulled the metal plate from your head using a magnet gun.

Essentially, you had always had thoughts of suicide, and never had the guts to follow through. You could lie and try to make everyone feel better by saying that all you needed was a nice walk in the sun, but that would be pointless at best and lulling them into a false sense of security at worst. You’re a mess of a human being, and everyone can see that rather clearly, yet still, relentlessly, you have a loving family. You wish that you didn’t. You wish that they’d leave and find someone more responsive and someone with real emotions and someone who didn’t have a mild dependency on alcohol.

You wish that you’d told Stanley about it when you were both kids. You wish you’d cried out to Fiddleford instead of muting your mind under monthly binges. You wish that Stanley hadn’t opened the portal; that you could have died with Bill Cipher; that you had died with some semblance of happiness.

You wish that you were drunk right now, so that slitting your wrists open and bleeding out would feel like a better idea. On some level, you’re aware of familial ties and how pure and basic and necessary they are for Stanley and Mabel and Dipper, but in your heart and mind you know that they’d be better off without you and that, in the end, they had no say in the matter.

You sneak upstairs as the sun rises red, and you take a single knife from the draining board. It’s easy from there. You take a shot of vodka, go back down into the basement, and make a clinical incision along the artery of your right wrist then, more shakily, the left. As your pulse beats, blood spurts out second by second, moment by moment, and you wish that someone would find you and save you; that someone would just come down and hold you closely and lovingly, even though you deserve to die alone. You just want someone, anyone, to just _be_ there with you in your final moments.

Anyone but Mabel, who sees you even before you vision darkens to save you from the sight of her fearful face. Anyone but Mabel, whose face contorts and who rifles through your things to try and find bandages, and when she does, she wraps them around your wrists tightly. Anyone but Mabel, who hoists you up in her arms like an infant, and who carries you upstairs and into the car, and who drives straight to the local hospital to get you checked in the emergency ward.

 

-

 

You’re sick of withdrawal. Not just physically, because it’s a very messy process, but you can barely stand it in your mind anymore. Last time you were in hospital and forced away from alcohol and nicotine for a while, you relapsed as soon as you were released from constant medical surveillance. This time, however, they’ve brought Stanley and Dipper and Mabel in to talk you into staying sober or whatever rancid medical bullshit they’re feeding your family on this time.

As Stanley tries to convince you to take some ridiculous pills that will help your brain balance out its chemicals, you’re busy watching Dipper. He doesn’t look at you in return. He leans against the white hospital wall next to your bed in the shared ward that, nevertheless, is empty save for you. You can’t read his expression.

“They’ll help you stop feeling like this,” Stanley says. “They’ll help to stop you from wanting to die. Please, Ford, please trust me on this.”

You shrug pathetically from under the plain white bedsheets. Stanley clutches your shoulder, and you see his face, hollow and crumpled and crying.

“Please, Ford,” he says. “You deserve to feel happy. You deserve to live.”

“I don’t care,” you croak out, before coughing to clear your throat.

Stanley pauses for a moment, his mouth hanging open a little, and you take your chance to talk.

“I don’t care whether or not you think that I deserve life, or happiness, or _anything_. I want to die,” you say, your voice low, “and I’ll keep on trying to kill myself until I do.”

Some kind of strange, guttural sound emerges from Stanley as Mabel lets out a choked sob.

You sigh. “I don’t want to argue about it, I just want to say that you three should stop making this so difficult and let me die.”

“You don’t want to argue about it?” Stanley responds, his voice increasing in pitch a little. He sounds ridiculous. “You’re acting like this is who chooses the TV channel, not your suicide attempts! You can’t die! You’ll hurt the kids! You’ll hurt me, Ford. Do you really want that? That’s why we’re trying to stop you! Please, Ford, I know how you feel, I always have, and it gets better-”

“For once in your godforsaken life, Stanley, stop interfering with what I want to do!” you finally shout. “If you really wanted to help, if you really knew how I felt for my entire life, then why didn’t you help me before I wanted to die?”

“You picked a fight with me!” he yells back, as quick to rise to the bait as ever. “I tried to help, but you told me to fuck off without you!”

“Are you really pretending like that was the start?” you laugh. You’re shaking, and not entirely from withdrawal. “Are you really that fucking delusional, Stanley?”

“Oh, I’m _sorry_! I forgot that sticking a skeleton dressed like you through a noose is a completely normal thing to do!” Stanley mocks.

“Since we were _kids_!” you scream. “I’ve wanted to die before we were even seven years old, Stanley!”

Suddenly, all of the energy that you used to fight goes out of you, like Mabel deflating old balloons a week after the party ended. The adrenaline evaporates, leaving you as an empty husk.

“Fucking hell, Stanley, I’ve wanted to die since we were kids,” you choke out. “Please, just let me go. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“I…”

Stanley’s voice is no more than a weak whisper, croaking out of his throat as if he sorely needed a drink, and wasn’t that just what was constantly in the back of your mind now? But your brother stands up slowly, rising out of the chair next to your hospital bed, and he makes some stupid excuse about needing some air or to pee or something that nobody believes, but you’re too tired to call him out on his bullshit again. Dipper leaves too, and you can’t blame him because you’d leave you too, but Mabel sits down in Stanley’s vacated chair.

You don’t want to talk to her. She’s going to ask you why you tried to kill yourself again, and you’ll have no more answers past the pathetic excuses that you’ve already made. And maybe, finally, you’ll be alone.

“I’m sorry,” Mabel says, and she sounds like she’s been crying. “I… How… Please can you tell me how I can help you and stop you from feeling like this?”

There are multiple ways that you could answer this question. You could give a simple answer to keep your great-niece satisfied while you continue wanting to die, you could give a complex answer that would not entirely be true, or you could just tell the plain truth.

“No,” you say. Then again, Mabel deserves some elaboration. “It’ll just make it worse.”

Mabel looks taken aback. “How?”

You sigh, leaning back even further into the overly soft hospital pillow. Somehow, your head feels both heavy and light, like a lead balloon filled with helium. “Because I don’t deserve it, Mabel. I deserved to fall into the portal. I deserved the three decades trapped in the multiverse. I deserved to die after I killed Bill and stopped him from hurting anyone else. I didn’t deserve to come back, or have a family, or anything.”

“But you stayed,” says Mabel, reaching under the covers and taking your hand, alerting you to the bandages that would have inevitably been wrapped around your wrists. “You stayed with us, and you were happy.”

“For a while,” you suppose. “I liked being with you, and Dipper, and Stanley, and everyone, but after a while I remembered everything. And then, every time I’d see you, or Dipper, or Stanley, I’d remember how much happier you’d all be without me there. But for some reason, all of you made me want to live. That was rather selfish of me.”

Mabel rests her head on your pillow right next to you, butting her head against your ear. “It wasn’t selfish. We loved every moment spent with you, and then you left, and Grunkle Stan… He was kind of scary. He got really shouty at some points, and I just wanted him to be with us and stick with us because you’d gone and we all kind of knew why.”

“You knew?” You try to sit up for a second, but Mabel flings her arm over your chest and pulls you back down.

“We knew about the depression,” she nods, then with a complete non-sequitur, continues to talk. “Did we ever tell you about Aunt Claire?”

Squinting, you reply, “Aunt Claire?”

“I’ll take that as a no,” she sighs, before sitting back up and curling up on her chair.

“Wait, this isn’t going where I think it is, right?” you ask, but Mabel just raises a hand in response, looking at her feet.

“Aunt Claire was my mom’s sister,” she begins. “She was really silly a lot of the time, but every few months she would fly off to somewhere and we wouldn’t hear from her until she came back with loads of presents for us, then she’d disappear again for another few months until Mom went and talked to her and took her to the doctor.”

You groan. This is going _exactly_ where you thought it would.

“When Dipper and I were about nine, she came to live with Mom, and she started to act like her silly self again,” Mabel says, closing her eyes. “And then, a few months later, she died.”

With a sigh, you say, “So she committed suicide, and this is your way of saying that you don’t want me to kill myself too?”

Mabel smiles bitterly. “It’s my way of saying that I can’t stop you, and I’m seven years older than I was back then, and I’ve looked on ever website I can find, and I still don’t know how to help you.”

“Then don’t,” you say. “Don’t bother with me, Mabel. Just go home, and go to art college, and don’t make my mistakes.”

She looks as though she wants to reply with a lot of words, but she pauses and visibly gulps instead of speaking. You snort quietly in amusement. She looks like a fish when she’s thinking.

“No,” she says, and you didn’t expect anything different. Mabel is good, and loyal, and stubborn. She would follow her family into hell.

You would lead her there.

“You’re my family, and I’m staying with you, through thick and thin,” says Mabel. There’s a determined furrow to her eyebrows, and you hate that. You hate that she cares.

“This isn’t a fairy story,” you murmur, slow and deliberate. “You’re not going to fix me by hugging me and then everyone lives happily ever after.”

Mabel opens her mouth to speak, but you raise your voice and continue. She needs to hear this. Well, you need to say it. What’s the difference, really?

“If anything, I’m a fairytale villain. Dark magic and demon deals, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if a prince condemned me to walk on hot coals until I die. I’d deserve it. We both know that. I’m awful and I should have died on the other side of-“

“Shut up!” Mabel shouts.

You jolt in surprise, and all of your IVs and drips wiggle a bit, which is frankly very uncomfortable.

Mabel squishes your cheeks as she makes you look at her. You can’t bring much energy to your expression, but that’s okay, because Mabel can’t see through her tears.

“I love you, Grunkle Ford, so you belong in this dimension with me and Dipper and Grunkle Stan!” she continues. Her voice fills the empty air of the hospital room, but the sound dies in the silence so she brings out more words, screaming into the abyss, or rather, your face. Mabel has never learnt how to control her volume. “You’re smart and funny and brave and I know that it doesn’t feel like it sometimes because of your brain lying to you, but you’re important! You deserve happiness! And I want to help you until you realise that too!”

You close your eyes. Mabel looks simultaneously intimidating and helpless, and you just want to hold her on your lap, squeeze her tight, and ask her what happened to hurt her so badly. But she isn’t twelve anymore. She’s probably taller than you. You don’t remember if she is, or if you ever bothered to notice.

She’s still Mabel, though. She’s still your weird, sparkly great-niece. It’s just that somehow, at some point, she became stronger and braver than you. While you ran and hid from your problems, Mabel was facing hers and everyone else’s headfirst.

And somewhere deep in your mind, brought to the forefront by Mabel’s tears and, to be quite honest, the fact that you are slightly high on the painkillers being pumped into you, you don’t want to live like this anymore. Somewhere, you remember smiling and laughing and those expressions being joyfully genuine, and you remember feeling and having those feelings fill you up and overflow because they were all mixed with so much love that you couldn’t contain the ridiculous emotions inside your heart.

It doesn’t matter. You’ve thought of those times before.

But you look at Mabel and she’s smiling hopefully and you smile back. That’s probably the key, because then her head plops onto your chest and her hair flies into your face but you don’t care. Your arms navigate cautiously around your IVs to let you hug Mabel. It’s awkward, and silly, and you can’t breathe properly, but you’re with Mabel and you’re feeling the first shred of something that isn’t guilt and hurt and endless clichéd despair for the first time in _so long_.

You want to get better.

 

-

 

It doesn’t take long for Stanley to find you a therapist.

Five seconds after he comes back into your hospital room, he sits in the chair that Mabel just vacated and says, quite simply, “I got you a therapist.”

You stare at him, because _how the hell_?

Stanley must take your expression for something different though, because he slumps and says, “I know. I’m sorry. You don’t have to do that.”

“No, I want to,” you reply, stumbling over your words a little.

You don’t really want to go, but there’s an understanding somewhere in your mind that you can’t go on like this, and that you owe it to your family to stick around and stay healthy or whatever they want, and that’s not exactly healthy, but baby steps, right? So you need to go to therapy, and talk out your problems and everything.

“Good,” says Stanley, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards for a moment. “You… You know, she was here during the… She survived Weirdmageddon for a couple of days. She’ll understand anything, I think.”

You shrink into your mattress. Starting the apocalypse was not your proudest moment. Okay, so it run through your mind every time you think that you might deserve something better than dying slowly and alone and never being mourned. It might be a problem with you. You don’t care.

“Okay,” you say quietly. “But, um, please can you handle the organising of it all? I just…”

Stanley takes your hand, weaving his five fingers in between your six, and squeezes gently. “Sure, poindexter. Uh, thanks for trusting me with that.”

“I’m tired,” you mumble. You shift your head so that you’re a little closer to Stanley. He takes a moment to figure it out, but soon he places a hand on your head and gently strokes your hair.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I keep yelling at you. I don’t want to fight, Ford. I want to help.”

You force a smile. “I know, Stanley. And I want to sleep.”

You close your eyes, only for Stanley lifts his hand from your head. You make a little mewling sound at the sudden loss of contact and, if you weren’t half-high on painkillers and completely exhausted, you might be embarrassed. As it is, you drift off to sleep a minute or so later, timing your breathing with the feeling of hair being stroked.

You don’t know if this is happiness. It’s okay, though. You’re okay like this.

 

-

 

It’s not as easy as you had anticipated.

Sure, after desperate begging, Stanley didn’t check you into a rehabilitation clinic before taking you back home, but he _had_ removed all of the alcohol in the house. Even your stashes. _Especially_ your stashes.

And, yes, maybe it was rather silly and melodramatic of you to have alcohol stashes, but you nevertheless did, and now they’re gone. At least he lets you keep your cigarettes, though the box is entrusted to Mabel. This results in having to talk out your emotional issues for at least ten minutes before you’re even allowed to ask for one, but you’re pretty sure that’s the point.

They kept you in the hospital for detox, though, and the nurses weaned you off of alcohol slowly instead of letting you dive headfirst into withdrawal. Logically, it’s obvious that they were doing it so that you wouldn’t experience so many side effects, but it was still rather awful.

Now, your wanting for alcohol is more of an ache, like the numbed scar of month-old surgery. Your wanting for nicotine, however, is stronger than before, and is also currently leaving you in a heated debate with Mabel.

“ _Please_? I’ll buy you all of the candy you want, just please let me have one.”

Okay, so maybe that’s more begging than debating, but nevertheless, you are a senior citizen who is bargaining for a cigarette with a teenager. At least it’s not the first time.

“I guess,” Mabel frowns disapprovingly, and something that might be relief begins to fill your chest, until she continues talking. “But we’re going to make a chart of how many you’re allowed every day.”

You groan. Not the _charts_. Hopefully she won’t insist on giving you a sticker for when you decide not to smoke.

Who are you kidding? Of course she’ll cover you in stickers whenever she has the chance.

 

-

 

“So, Stanford,” Doctor Elinor Stroud says. “You have a history of depression and anxiety, is this correct?”

You nod. The room’s air feels both heavy in your lungs and light in your head, rather like in the Gravityless Dimension, where everything had gravity except for humans, so they had ended up developing little weights to use to walk around with, like a helium balloon tied around a fence. You’d almost died in that dimension. You almost died in most dimensions, and you know that in some alternate timelines, you actually did die, and you’re kind of jealous of those other Fords, who are both infinite and timeless and so little in number.

“And this resulted in a suicide attempt, leading you to seek help?”

That could be considered to be excellent timing, you suppose. You consider speaking, but then your heart jumps into your throat and chokes you silently. Instead, you just stare at the wall. It’s painted in a mild peachy-orange colour that clashes a little with the maroon carpet. Or maybe it’s a lot. But seriously, it’s just walls and a carpet.

You should probably respond to the question.

Wordlessly, you pull your sleeve up to your elbow, revealing the pink scar that you don’t really think will ever heal. Doctor Stroud seems to take this as an affirmative response, and writes something down on her little clipboard.

“You must understand, Stanford, this is necessary for me to ask so that I can make sure that the paperwork is all correct,” she says patiently.

Why did you agree to this?

Oh yeah. The idea of help seemed less intimidating when you were still in a hospital bed with your arms wrapped up in neat little bandages.

Now, though, it just feels degrading. You’re Stanford Filbrick Pines. You survived the multiverse, for fuck’s sake! You lived for thirty years hopping between various dimensions, many of which you never existed in, and for what? Now you’re just a pathetic old man, sitting in an old paisley armchair opposite a woman with a smile that seemed almost mocking in her patience, and you’re having a lovely heart-to-heart on why you tried to bleed yourself out, amongst other things.

“Would you like me to bring in your brother?” you hear Doctor Stroud say, and she must have been saying other things beforehand, but you don’t know what it was, so you just shake your head as much as you can, because this is therapy, where you have to talk about your problems, and you don’t want to know what else is on your records that Stan should never know about.

But she just nods, and smiles, and says, “So, I thought that today we could get to know one another and get more comfortable with each other.”

“Twenty questions?” you mutter, remembering that little machine that Soos had that could guess a lot of things from this dimension, but not much from the others.

Doctor Stroud laughs, and says, “Sure, that’s one way we can do this. Do you want to go first?”

You hesitate for a moment. Your brain is screaming at you to remain silent, but there is one little voice in your ear that sounds like Mabel, you think.

“What’s your favourite colour?” you ask.

“Beige,” Doctor Stroud replies, grinning broadly. Hell, she looks kind of like some sort of formal Mabel. “And you?”

“Burgundy,” you say. Then, because you can’t keep your mouth shut, you say, “Anything but yellow, really.”

Doctor Stroud’s smile is so demeaning that you can physically feel yourself blushing.

_Don’t be stupid, Ford, she’s not being demeaning. That’s sympathy. You know, that thing you can never feel because you’re past disgusting and right into complete scum?_

“Who would win in a fight, Mothman or Bigfoot?” you distantly feel yourself ask.

What.

“Neither, they’re dating and they come to very good compromises,” says Doctor Stroud, completely seriously.

Huh. Maybe this therapy thing wasn’t a mistake, after all.

And she doesn’t talk down to you, and she understands that the Loch Ness Monster is just a hoax created by a bored colony of selkies, and she doesn’t press on questions that you refuse to answer. She will one day, and you know that, and you understand why, but she has a job, which is to talk to you and help you out of this place that your brain is stuck in. Well, you say it’s a place, but you’re rather certain that you’re trapped more in a time than a place, now, and that time is the past, when you were constantly watching your back for Bill Cipher, who is long dead and can never cause you new pain. It’s your childhood, when you remember hiding your hands, not only for your freakish mutation but your equally disgusting habit of letting your hands flap freely like a fledgling bird trying to fly for the first time. And, continuing from that thought, you suppose that it is also the way that you think about yourself, even when you look at Dipper, who does not proudly display his birthmark but no longer actively hides it anymore, and Mabel, whose smile is so wide that it cannot be possibly contained on her face and it needs to move her body backwards and forwards as her hands create what could be gale-force winds. You love them, and you love those things about them, but then you consider thinking of yourself as you think of them and you feel sick to your stomach, because you’re different, and you have to be, because if you’re not different and awful and desperately looking for a way to make up for all of your shortcomings, then who are you, and who should you be?

And maybe you need to leave the past behind you.

Doctor Elinor Stroud smiles as she escorts you from her office, your first therapy session being over already, though you had barely begun to cover your vast range of mental issues. You feel some kind of – no, not pride – but you feel brighter in your heart, somehow. You think that you’re a little happier.

Stan drives you back to the Mystery Shack, and he smiles just as much as you do as the radio plays in the background, cracking and stuttering and sparking a little. You… Stan needs to see a real mechanic.

 

-

 

And one day, you’re just sitting on the couch. You’ve seen this episode of Ghost Harassers about ten times, so you’re not really paying attention, and you’re instead marvelling at the fact that you’ve showered and changed into clean clothes. You’d share this victory with Stanley and the rest of your family, if most of them weren’t out vandalising Mayor Tyler’s house again.

That being said, there’s one person still in the house, but when you think about talking to him, you freeze up. It’s not as ridiculous as your anxiety usually is, because generally, when you rely on the same person to listen to all of your irrational ideas before suicide attempts and give them no room to help you, it kind of makes your relationship with them strained.

And, speaking of which, Dipper walks into the room with wet shower hair and an outfit that could probably double as pyjamas.

“Hey, Grunkle Ford,” he says.

You inevitably freeze up, but fight against every impulse in your body to move your mouth and croak out a little, “Hi.”

Have you ever actually said _hi_ before?

No. No you have not. It’s always _hello_ or _greetings_ or something along those lines. _Hi_ is too casual.

Oh well.

Dipper sits on the couch next to you.

“I’m sorry,” you say to him, scrunching your eyes shut so that you can pretend that he’s not there, even though you can feel where the couch cushions have sunk because Dipper is literally sitting right there, and you know every single one of your family members simply by how their breathing interrupts the atmosphere in a bold acknowledgement of every second of their lives.

“I’m sorry,” you say, “for forcing you to handle my problems from since you were twelve, and for behaving as if I’d improved until I got you to help me leave everyone, and I’m sorry for making you all worry, and for every moment that you felt personally responsible for my own decisions as an individual. I’m sorry that I didn’t talk to you like how I talked to Mabel and Stanley and everybody else. I’m so, so, sorry, Dipper.”

Dipper replies almost instantly. “I’m not going to pretend that it’s completely fine, and that you did nothing wrong, because, yeah, some of what you did was pretty messed up.”

Just that sentence makes you feel like quitting your therapy after a month of sessions, because a good person would never hurt Dipper Pines. You never should have entered the lives of these children.

But he doesn’t finish there. He continues talking, and his smile is soft and gentle, like he still cares about you. “But you had reasons for it. And I know that you’re never going to leave your martyr complex behind, where you try and keep casualties to a minimum, but I promise, Grunkle Ford, every single one of your family is here to help you. Well, they’re not here right now, because Mabel made everyone leave so that we could talk our problems out, but you know what I mean. It’s like, I’m not the only person that you have to depend on, and I never should have been, but we can fix things, I think. I mean, you’re my great-uncle, and you’re one of the most important people to me, even when we were just avoiding each other for ages.”

“I made you feel alone,” you say into your hands. “I forced you to keep so many secrets. I should have learnt from the Rift.”

“Yes,” says Dipper, moving one of your hands away from your face to hold it. “But every time you make mistakes, you run yourself to the ground trying to fix them. Grunkle Ford, you don’t need to do that, especially not now. You have… You have _really_ bad depression. But we all want to help you, and we all want to look after you. And that includes me.”

You mumble, “I’ve put you through so much.”

Dipper nods. “And I’m still here.”

“Why?”

Your voice is beginning to crack, and you are so terrified that in one moment, Dipper would finally understand just how awful you are, and that he should never forgive you, and that you would always be better off dead-

“Because you’re my family,” he says, and his tone is so nonchalant that you could swear that he’s joking.

So you shake your head and you say, “No, I don’t have to be. You don’t have to have me as your family just because I’m related to you. That’s not how this should work when it comes to people you care about. I’m not someone that you should be around.”

“I don’t care,” Dipper says, and envelops your hand with both of his, and his palms are no longer tiny and childishly soft. Dipper’s an adult now, you think. He’s not twelve. He’s not fourteen. He’s his own person who can make his own decisions as freely as he wants to. “Even if I picked and chose everyone in my family, and cut off everyone that I never wanted to see again, I’d still want you in my life. You’re so important to me, Grunkle Ford, and you’re so important to Mabel and Stan and everyone, but you matter to all of us, and you matter to me. I love you, Grunkle Ford.”

And he hugs you.

His hair is still slightly damp, and your vision is blurry through your warm tears, but you shakily lift your arms around him to clutch Dipper to your chest, and he holds you like you’re some kind of lost child, and you let yourself sob into his shoulder.

Your conversation isn’t over. Your problems aren’t over.

But eventually the rest of your family comes home, and they join you and Dipper on the couch, and Stanley laughs with his belly heaving like ocean waves, and Mabel smiles like the sun rising in a cloudless sky, and Wendy and Soos punch you affectionately and hug everyone at once respectively, and you…

You settle down with your family, and you let yourself smile contentedly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry for the iffy quality. i wanted to get this out as soon as possible, but it was. really difficult to write
> 
> edit:
> 
> hey. you know who you are. i'm proud of you. i'm so glad to have met you. are you feeling alright today? probably not, if you're here. i hope you feel better now, or, if not, i hope you feel a little less alone. you deserve so much better than what life gave you, and i believe that you can get it <3

**Author's Note:**

> screw this i've spent two hours trying to find a title so have a line from not stopping by the woods on a snowy evening by jennifer michael hecht


End file.
